Crucial to direct aid to right people

17 November 2013 - 02:02 By The Daily Telegraph and Reuters
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NATURE'S WRATH: The bodies of a woman and child, victims of super typhoon Haiyan, float in the sea off Tacloban yesterday. The death toll from one of the world's most powerful typhoons surged this weekend, but the aid effort was still a struggle as bodies lay uncollected Picture: REUTERS
NATURE'S WRATH: The bodies of a woman and child, victims of super typhoon Haiyan, float in the sea off Tacloban yesterday. The death toll from one of the world's most powerful typhoons surged this weekend, but the aid effort was still a struggle as bodies lay uncollected Picture: REUTERS

Logistics Nightmare | The UN came to Haiti after the earthquake in January 2010 and left behind a disaster. Let us hope it is not the same after the typhoon in the Philippines, writes David Blair

IN the end, the smell lives on as the strongest memory. In January 2010, I was sent to Haiti just after an earthquake had devastated the capital, Port-au-Prince. In the aftermath of this calamity, which claimed as many as 300000 lives, the ruins of the city were pervaded by a particular smell combining tropical humidity, pulverised buildings, spilt petrol, filth, sweat and - most cloyingly of all - decomposing human remains.

Today, the scenes in the Philippines are tragically similar. All emergencies have their own characteristics, but there are parallels between the catastrophe wrought by typhoon Haiyan - one of the world's most powerful super storms - and the Haiti earthquake. Once again, a city seems to have borne the brunt of the disaster - in this case Tacloban in the province of Leyte - and, once again, the priority will be to deliver emergency aid through a congested airport.

A few key lessons can be learnt from the searing experience of Haiti, when no one would seriously deny that the humanitarian response went badly wrong.

First of all, forget about the headline figures for the amount of aid that will now be pledged for the Philippines. Between 2010 and 2012, the world promised $9.3-billion (about R93-billion) for Haiti, but even on the most generous estimate, only about half of this was ever delivered.

In Port-au-Prince, almost 700000 people were sleeping in the open every night because their homes had been destroyed. Astonishingly, even after all the promises, about 300000 of them are still homeless today.

And that leads to the second lesson: the quantity of aid that gets delivered to the Philippines does not matter: all that counts is the amount that finds it way into the hands of those in need.

In Haiti, hundreds of aid agencies sent supplies to Toussaint L'Ouverture airport in Port-au-Prince - and much of it got no further. In the weeks after the earthquake, prodigious quantities of food and medical equipment piled up at the airport, filling hangar after hangar while people were dying for want of basic essentials barely a kilometre away. No one was in charge and there was no proper organisation.

How did this happen? The UN and many aid agencies are not keen to publicise this, but they tend to be in the wholesale and not the retail business when it comes to humanitarian response. They deliver essential material, but they leave the actual distribution to someone else, usually the national government. That is fine if disaster strikes in a country with a strong and efficient state.

In Haiti, however, the government barely functioned at the best of times.

Some aid did reach the needy in those early weeks - and it was distributed mainly by the US military, which had the transport and logistics. It also had a clear line of command and a natural focus on getting the job done.

In the early days of a disaster, when the prime goal is to keep people alive, armies are best placed to do the job. Haiti was fortunate in only one respect: the US military was just the other side of the Caribbean.

Meanwhile, the UN has doubled its estimate of people made homeless in the Philippines to nearly two million. But the aid effort is still patchy and bodies lay uncollected yesterday as rescuers tried to evacuate stricken communities more than a week after the typhoon killed at least 3633 people.

After long delays, hundreds of international aid workers set up makeshift hospitals and trucked in supplies yesterday as helicopters from a US aircraft carrier ferried medicine and water to remote, battered areas.

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